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Setting aside your pompous overall tone - which is probably not helping you to win any arguments - the best I've been able to parse from what you've said so far
by glenra 13y ago
Setting aside your pompous overall tone - which is probably not helping you to win any arguments - the best I've been able to parse from what you've said so far is this: if somebody already accepts a slew of Marxist assertions, then this new Marxist assertion seems ordinary and reasonable.
And I agree, it probably does.
But since I'm not already a Marxist, I don't have any existing framework wherein it makes sense to say things like "concentrated capital exploits labor" much less to discuss how this allegedly happens and how that goes on to create what "Marxist analysts" mean by "anxiety". (I'm not convinced the word "exploit" is even a useful term in this context.)
I would prefer instead frame employment in terms of ordinary economics and say that when any two parties agree on any sort of contract there is likely to be both a producer surplus and a consumer surplus; both sides profit by the exchange. If it made sense to call one of those surpluses "exploitation", you'd have to call the other one that too. It's not one-sided.
Sadly, pseudo-marxists have been spouting this sort of stuff for so long that by now they've polluted the terms "capitalism" and "capitalist"; it might be easier for free-market advocates to give up and start over with a new term (like, say, "free-market advocates") for what economists used to mean by "capitalism" than to keep fighting over it. I'm probably never going to convince you that "capitalism" doesn't "exploit workers" because to you, "exploiting workers" is part of the definition of "capitalism".
When I say something is an extraordinary claim, I merely mean it's a claim that seems intuitively false to me. Since the claim was phrased in a way that didn't seem to exclude my own subjective sense of the world as a source of evidence, I consulted that sense, and found the claim wanting.
In the end, it seems like the title claim of the article - "you are a Marxist" - probably just doesn't apply to me. Maybe it applies to you. Which is fine.
- theothermkn 13y agoDon't worry, scrote. There are plenty of 'tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was 'tarded. She's a pilot now.
- glenra 13y agoWhen people don't find your arguments convincing, you might want to at least consider the possibility that your arguments aren't very good. Or perhaps (as in this case) you've just done a bad job of showing their relevance to the current conversational context. The fact that nobody except you seems to have read the text the way you read it doesn't prove you're wrong and everyone else is right, but it does suggest you might want to take a step back and look at what assumptions you're making that others aren't. You recently said that conversations are for "finding out"; how exactly does talking down to people and calling them 'tards advance that goal?